Gardenia: A Review Shop

✿﹒{Katie} Rejected to Fate﹒％

❀﹒Client: Lasophie79 

❀﹒Title: Rejected to Fate

❀﹒Reviewer: katiegoesmew 

❀﹒Review:  81/140

First impressions: 30/40

Title: 10/10
This is a thought-provoking title. Usually, I'd hear "abandoned to fate," or I'd expect maybe "rejected by fate," and just the slight change of wording brings different connotations. It makes me curious to see where this goes.

Blurb/synopsis: 6/10
This is tricky for me, because your line formatting and word choice makes this blurb very poetic, and I'm not a poet. So, I don't feel entirely comfortable making any recommendations about major changes to words or lines, but there are punctuation and grammar issues I can address, and hopefully that won't impact the lyrical flow (or negatively impact it, anyway).

First thing, no double punctuation. If there's a question mark, you don't need a comma. The only exception to this rule (aside from dialogue, which isn't in play here) is ellipses (...). Having that trailing effect with a question mark to indicate the slight upturn in tone that marks a hesitant question is really handy. But I'd flip it around so the ellipsis comes before the question mark (...?). And when you're using those trailing periods, make sure it's just three. No more, no less. As far as commas...if this were prose, I'd say you're overusing commas, but poetic use is much more stylistic. In poetry, commas are used to introduce pauses for the reader to ensure they read at the cadence you want to get the effect you want. So, I'm not touching those here.

Okay, now onto the grammar. I'm going to take this paragraph-by-paragraph instead of line-by-line, since it all flows together. My biggest overall problem here is figuring out tense. It feels like the tense is ambiguous because it changes from present to past so often, but I think that comes from all the reflections of the past happening in the present, and the contractions to start this off don't help. So...I guess I'll figure that out as I go.

"How'd you feel?" throws me right away. "How'd" is a contraction of "how did," "how would," or "how had," but the "you" also adds in the possibility of reading this as a contraction of "How do you." The next sentence starting with "When you're" doesn't help me much with figuring that out, because then I get stuck trying to decide if this is the contraction of "you are" or "you were." My mind automatically goes to the present tense when I see contractions. I get the feeling "if" may work better than "when" here, because it seems like the protagonist is talking directly to the reader. "A reason unknown" is probably fine for poetic use, but it feels more natural for me to say "an unknown reason." "Will it be" confuses me, because we've strayed from "How'd you feel?" enough that I have to look back to realize this is suggesting feelings I could have if I experienced the things listed.

So, I think it's best to treat this as a break in the fourth wall with the protagonist talking directly to the reader and asking hypothetical questions about what they would feel and do if they experienced what the protagonist experienced. This is what I came up with to make this clearer:

How would you feel? If you were treated like dirt, a liar, an unwanted, a runt...
If you were orphaned by the very ones that haunt you, and you took it all as your weight?
How would you feel if it all seemed like a lie?
Your life and all?
If you were just punished for a reason unknown...?
Would you feel despair or fear?
Pain or self criticism...?